Orchardist sings praises of AFD deal

“In they end I said, you’re going to send me broke,” said Mr Petrucci, who grows 8.5 hectares of mostly stonefruit in the Kalamunda-Lesmurdie area.

“It was deteriorating my health - I wasn’t happy anymore.”

“You’d deliver; you’d always be waiting for the phone to ring, because they wanted everything for nothing, and everything perfect, like it came out of a machine. At the end of the day, you can’t grow fruit like that.”

Mr Petrucci now sells 30-40 per cent of his fruit to Aussie Farmers Direct - all the WA franchises can currently take - and puts the rest into local markets or exports it.

If he could supply AFD solely, Mr Petrucci thinks he would be “miles ahead” in profitability.

“AFD’s price structure is a lot more average. At the start of the season, when things might be going for $9 a kilo - we don’t go there. At the end of the season, when prices might drop to $1 a kilo - we don’t go there either. We hover in the $3/kg range.”

That’s a better option than the uncertainty he experienced with Coles, which Mr Petrucci said would ask growers to drop prices to support internal promotions.

“You would go into a shop and see your fruit sold for $5.99/kg, and we’d sold it for not even $1 a kilo. And we had packing costs on top of all that. We had to use their crates in the end, and they were charging us 20 cents a day to use them.”

“We had to hire pallets off them, but the hire cost didn’t come off our account until days after we’d delivered. So they would get the fruit delivered, the fruit would be in the shop and the pallet back at Chep, and they didn’t pay costs - the grower cops it all.”

And Mr Petrucci likes the fact that AFD will talk to him when he hits a bump.

“With Coles, you’d call, leave a message, and if they needed stuff they would ring you back, but if they didn’t need it they would never get back to you.”